No One At Best Buy Actually Wants To Sell Me An Xbox

In the last year, Best Buy has been attempting to market itself not just as a place to go to purchase electronics, but as a store where you’ll find helpful and informed employees. That’s not exactly the impression one Consumerist reader got after his last visit to the store.

John went to his local Best Buy to take advantage of a pretty decent deal on an Xbox 360. He could get the console, complete with 250GB of storage and a Kinect for only $149 if he signed up for a 2-year contract with Xbox Live at the register.

But when he got to the register, John says the employee there admitted he that he had no clue how to ring up the Xbox at the discounted price.

The employee said he’d have to get someone to help him figure it out.

“Okay, not a problem,” John figured. “It won’t take too long.”

He then spent the next 45 minutes waiting at the counter while the employee continued serving other customers and not doing anything to see if anyone could actually help John.

Tired of waiting, John began to leave the store.

“I was going to go elsewhere for a purchase,” he writes, “since Best Buy wasn’t interested in my money.”

But he decided to give it one more try, figuring he wouldn’t get the deal at any other store. So he asked the employee if he could speak to a manager. John says the employee rudely replied, “Fine, but it ain’t gonna help.”

This leads to 30 more minutes of waiting, with the cashier insisting that he’s still waiting on the manager to come out.

So John decided to take matters into his own hands, walking around the store, calling out the manager’s name.

“I find her in TVs, and she says nobody asked for her help!” he tells Consumerist. “What’s even worse, she proceeds to tell us how dumb her other employees are and that they hate ringing this particular item out because it’s a lengthy process.”

The checkout process did actually take longer than usual, even with someone who knew what they were doing. But it certainly required less time than the 75 minutes he spent waiting for assistance.

“I can’t believe Best Buy employees kept passing the buck in order to avoid a transaction that takes a little bit longer,” says John. “Why offer the sale if nobody wants to sell it?”

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